An outspoken American neo-Nazi recently voiced support for the Democrat president. That’s not a glitch, it’s a manifestation of US policies
By Fiorella Isabel, journalist, geopolitical analyst, RT correspondent and host of independent talk show The Convo Couch. Follow Fiorella on X @FiorellaIsabelM
FILE PHOTO. Christopher “Hammer” Pohlhaus (C) leads a rally with neo-Nazi groups on September 2, 2023 in Orlando, Florida © Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Orlando, Florida is home to Mickey Mouse, popular beaches, sunshine, alligators, and your hometown Nazi.
That’s what residents in parts of central Florida witnessed in an ironic twist, when multiple groups of neo-Nazis consisting of the Aryan Freedom Network, Order of the Black Sun, the 14 First, the Goyim Defense League, and Blood Tribe, were recently spotted around the area, exercising their First Amendment right, chanting hateful slogans and proudly boasting their White Supremacist tattoos for all to see.
The protestors claimed to support Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida who’s also running for president. Present was Kent “Boneface” McLellan, a neo-Nazi who reportedly gave information on others in his group after being arrested in an FBI sting in 2012 for domestic terrorism. He claims he went to Ukraine after the US-backed Maidan coup of 2014, to join the Right Sector ultranationalist group in the new Kiev authorities’ war against the dissenting republics of the Donbass. He then returned to the country in 2022, when the Russian military operation started, to join the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and said it was not the FBI that helped him get involved, but the CIA.
While American politicians and establishment media were appalled by the Orlando neo-Nazis’ display of hate, Blood Tribe leader and former US marine tied to the January 6th Capitol Hill riots, Christopher Pohlhaus, also known as “Hammer,” professed why he preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump in next year’s 2024 Presidential election. He proclaimed that at least “Biden sends rockets to Ukraine.” This highlights what the US media and Washington have consistently tried to bury since February of 2022: That Ukraine has a huge Nazi problem and that the US and its intelligence agency apparatus have historically not only been aware of it, but stand determined to train, advise, and weaponize these factions to achieve certain political goals.
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In an article published on November 17, 2017 CNN precisely outlines the connection between European fascism and factions of Neo-Nazis in the US. A 2021 Time magazine article highlighted how Azov is both a military and political force in Ukraine whose influence extends far beyond the country’s borders, with a network of extremist groups stretching from California to Europe and all the way to New Zealand. Among other evidence, one of the organizers of the August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia cited the Azov Battalion as an inspiration. That rally became infamous when one attendee plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring many others.
The article admits that the rise of Azov and the white nationalist movement came as a result of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, stating how Ukraine’s first post-Maidan president Petro Poroshenko lauded the Azov members as heroes. Just last week, Poroshenko was spotted wearing a Black Sun logo, a Nazi symbol once featured in the official Azov insignia, on his shoulder while visiting Ukrainian troops.
In October of 2019, forty members of Congress signed a letter calling for the US State Department to designate Azov a foreign terrorist organization, saying that “Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years,” but the letter ultimately went nowhere. Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI at the time, later confirmed via testimony to the US Senate that American white supremacists were “actually traveling overseas to train.” Both the CNN and Time articles went as far as (accurately) comparing Azov to jihadists in the Middle East, as this would not be the first time Washington resorted to using radical factions in order to achieve a political agenda.
Almost immediately after Russia began its military operation in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs, the media child of the Council on Foreign Relations, issued an interesting article outlining “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency.” For background, the CFR is an invitation-only think tank, born out of the British Institute of International Affairs, created to shape and mold the US role in international foreign policy. Founded in 1921 by business and civic leaders, the organization’s main goal was to exert the US as a dominant leader in global affairs, following the Monroe Doctrine thought process. In the piece, Douglas London, a retired Russian-speaking former CIA operations officer who had managed “counterinsurgency operations” focused on Central Asia, stated that thanks to “Putin’s aggression,” Russia would face a Ukrainian insurgency in an escalating conflict that could spread beyond the two countries’ borders and would have the support of the United States and NATO. “Ultra-nationalist” factions could be used by NATO-supported Ukraine in the same way that insurgencies were used in Afghanistan and Vietnam. London further haughtily outlined how the West uses these groups to create conflict and destabilize regions, exhausting nations with endless proxy wars until they admit defeat. He even mentioned the clandestine US military support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s against the Soviet Union, and for the Kurds post-2003. We can also look at how Libya, targeted under the Obama administration via then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, fell victim to such a regime change playbook, or the American support for the Contras in Nicaragua under then President Ronald Reagan. Remarkably, London outlines much of this as a good and necessary series of historical events, proclaiming that supporting insurgency is “in the CIA’s DNA” and that because of the agency’s experience in these regions, it is well-equipped to “assist Ukraine in its war against Russia.”
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Perhaps a less successful example is Washington’s backing of the “moderate rebels” in Syria, less than a decade ago. Recently journalist Seymour Hersh revealed new evidence of US intelligence supporting radical factions. In his latest article Hersh exposes a 5-page all-source report outlining how sarin gas, a toxic nerve agent, was prepared for the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) back in 2013. The report shows striking, detailed evidence that it was the jihadist faction al-Nusra and not Bashar Assad’s government, that was behind the now-infamous chemical attacks in Syria, like the ones in Ghouta in August 2013. And Washington’s intelligence not only had knowledge of this report, it willingly lied about it and, according to Hersh, kept it from the White House. He indicates that the issue of national security was used as the pretext to say nothing, as mainstream media vilified dissent on the issue and claimed that it was Assad who was responsible for gassing his own people, justifying US involvement in the decades-long Syrian civil war.
Post-World War II, the CIA embarked on Operation Paperclip, a program sponsoring the immigration of German and Austrian scientists and technicians, in order to exploit their knowledge for military purposes. Though it lasted only two years, versions of the program continued until 1962. In the end, 1,500 German and Austrian citizens were relocated to the US, along with their families. Most of them went on to become American citizens and their “nominal” ties to the Nazi Party were not a disqualification. As time went on, opposition and inquiries into the history of some of these scientists led to hearings in the US Congress and then an investigation. But no one was ever brought to trial and while Washington used the go-to pretext of “national security” to justify its actions, it omitted that the aim was to use the knowledge of these former Nazis to defeat the Soviet Union, which of course had lost millions of lives and played an essential role in defeating Nazi Germany just a few years before.
Just days ago during Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s speech in the Canadian parliament, the MPs gave a standing ovation to a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian man who had fought in the 14th division of the Waffen SS (also known as the 1st Galician) and hailed him as a hero because he fought against Russians during World War II. They failed to mention that the unit had committed massacres against Jews, Poles, Slovaks, & Soviet Partisans.
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Washington’s use of radicals never ended in this regard, instead expanding and rebranding itself via regime-change operations under the lofty ideals of “democracy” and “humanitarian aid,” embedded in the unipolar world order dominated by the West, led by the US, the EU, Great Britain, NATO and their multi-pronged military intelligence apparatus. An agenda that’s clearly come to a dark hour, faced by a new emerging multipolar world order from the East and South, impassioned by decades and centuries of exploitation, domination, and neo-colonialism.
But the NATO bloc seems to have no intention of acknowledging this global paradigm shift, and is instead sinking its nails into immovable cement, mired in an existential proxy war with Russia that it feels it must prolong until the very last Ukrainian. The Pentagon recently approved yet another billion dollars for Ukraine, including sending deadly depleted uranium ammunition, which will likely end up being used by factions of armed neo-Nazi forces on the people of Donbass. And as if that weren’t enough, NATO is planning to assemble more than 41,000 troops and 700 air units for what officials say will be the largest military exercise in decades, to be held next spring across Germany, Poland and the Baltic States. The goal is to show Moscow that NATO is ready to fight at any cost, whether it includes the weaponizing of dangerous, radical groups or the sacrificing of thousands of civilian lives amid nuclear escalations. The problem the world faces is in understanding that history often rhymes, and recognizing these patterns is essential in order to avoid further catastrophe.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
